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Monday, January 17, 2011

The Genealogist's Google Toolbox

I am a Google lover and think that I am a fairly sophisticated user of Google. However, whenever I read an article or attend a lecture about this family of products I always learn something new.

My fascination with Google started in the late 1990s when it became my search engine of choice. I have hopped on the bandwagon with many of Google's newer applications as they have been launched. Today I use many, but not all, of the Google Apps. my favourites being Gmail and Picasa.

The first Google resource I purchased was Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource (3rd Edition)but, as this was published in 2006, it is now out of date.I loved this book and found it extremely useful when teaching students and teachers about Google products. My next purchase was Google your family tree by Dan Lynch, this book aimed at genealogists was a more basic guide aimed at genealogists. Published in 2008 this book is now a little outdated and is due for a new edition. It is unfortunate that books about technology have a short shelf life.

A few days ago I noticed that there was a new book for genealogists on the market. Lisa Louise Cooke in her blog post this morning reminded readers about The Genealogist's Google Toolboxher new book "with all the best free state-of-the-art Internet tools I could find from the folks who dominate the online world: Google."

Lisa has chosen to publish her book through Lulu. The book is available in both hard and soft copy (.pdf), I elected to purchase a hard copy at $US24.95, if I find that I want to have this book on my computer I can then purchase the download for $14.95. Postage to Australia will take 3-5 days after the book is "processed". Before I purchased I was able to look at a preview of the book on Lisa's blog. From the images shown I can see it has an impressive Table of Contents, appears to be well formatted and has clear explanatory screenshots.